Typically, computing devices utilize hard disk drives for data storage. These hard disk drives have rotatable rigid platters located on a motor-driven spindle along with an actuator with a read/write head which are housed within a protective enclosure. With these hard disk drives, data can be magnetically read from and written to the platter by the read/write head that floats on a film of air above the platters.
Since their introduction, the cost and physical size of these hard disk drives have fallen while the storage capacity has increased. Additionally, average access time and latency time with hard disk drives have improved. Nevertheless, there are ongoing pressures to further reduce the access time and latency time associated with hard disk drives, particularly when booting an operating system at start up in a computer device.
The introduction of solid state drives has provided an alternative to the use of hard disk drives in computer apparatuses. Solids state drives are storage devices that store persistent data on solid-state flash memory. These solid state drives have lower access time and latency time than hard disk drives. Unfortunately, these solid state drives are still more expensive than hard disk drives and have other performance challenges, currently preventing the wholesale replacement of hard disk drives with solid state drives.
Currently, some laptops, netbooks, and other computing systems are being manufactured and sold with a preinstalled operating system burnt into memory. Although the pre-installation of these operating systems is convenient for some customers, it severely limits flexibility because the end user has no ability to change the preinstalled operating system to one that may be more suitable.